The Women's Liberation Movement and the Politics of Class in Britain

George Stevenson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781350178281
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350066618
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

This is the first study of the British Women's Liberation Movement's relationship with class politics. It explores the meaning of class to women's liberationists' identities and activism, both nationally and regionally, using a previously neglected feminist cluster in North East England as a case study.

Stevenson demonstrates that British feminism was shaped fundamentally by its relationship to, synthesis with, and rejection of class politics. Through these processes, feminists recognised how post-war changes in the economy and gender roles were reshaping class and the Women's Liberation Movement attempted to remake class politics in response. However, socio-economic and cultural class differences between the women involved - linked to occupation, education and background - remained intractable obstacles causing tensions within groups, fragmentations into specific class-based groups and the ultimate failure of the movement to coalesce into a coherent coalition with labour politics, despite great levels of solidarity around particular struggles.

Examining regional feminism against the national backdrop, The Women's Liberation Movement and the Politics of Class in Britain provides an engaging exploration of the fruitful but challenging relationship between British feminism and class politics in a capitalist society.

1

Introduction

This book will focus on the feminist voices, activism and experiences of working-class women engaged with the Women’s Movement and class politics and the Women’s Liberation Movement’s (WLM’s) engagement with them between 1968 and 1979. This approach will define the WLM as a part of the wider Women’s Movement, of which women’s industrial and community struggles were also parts. It will argue that contemporary accounts seeking to recover the significance of ‘sisterhood’ or prioritize alternative identities in the movement often do so at the expense of its working-class participants and underplay the significance of ‘class’ in the political identities of middle-class liberationists. It will suggest that the integration of working-class women and class politics into the story of the 1970s Women’s Movement requires a reconsideration of the existing narratives of the WLM. In so doing, it will illustrate how both structural and cultural forms of class analysis can offer complementary insights into women’s identity construction and political consciousness, with particular validity not only for social and political movements but also for the post-war period more widely.

It is certain that the WLM in Britain, and across Europe and the United States, was one of the most important social movements of the post-war period.¹ Born in the ‘synergistic’ environment of the late 1960s alongside the other New Social Movements (NSMs) of the period, it was in relation to these that the WLM wished to define itself, rather than as a development of previous or existing feminist movements.² It was constructed as an amorphous, structureless movement united by a list of four demands: equal pay, equal education and opportunity, twenty-four-hour nurseries and free contraception and abortion on demand.³ This was coupled with more tenuous notions relating to identity and social transformation – ‘sisterhood’ and ‘liberation’.⁴

It is in the legacy of this positioning that the first historiographical controversy arises in terms of the WLM’s relationship to other British feminist movements in the twentieth century. On the one hand, the early liberationists sought to differentiate themselves from the previous iterations of feminist politics, which they rejected as liberal and reformist, but on the other, this understanding coexisted with a desire to link their activism with that of the Suffrage Movement.⁵ This tension has contributed greatly to the dominance of the ‘wave’ school in the historiography of the British Women’s Movement in which the Suffrage Movement, ending in 1918 with the successful winning of the vote, stands as the ‘first wave’, before the crashing of the ‘second wave’ with the emergence of the WLM in 1968 or 1969.⁶

More recently, however, this narrative has been challenged by a number of historians. Pat Thane and Helen McCarthy, respectively, have argued that feminism was far from defunct after 1918. This was illustrated by persistent strikes by women in the Second World War, women’s presence in Parliament, in all political parties and in trade unions as well as the survival of women’s organizations, such as the Fawcett Society and Women’s Co-operative Guild, through the subsequent fifty years, as well as women winning equal pay in some areas of the public sector in the 1950s and early 1960s.⁷ Moreover, the Co-operative Women’s Guild, Labour Party women, Six Point Group and Fawcett Society forwarded the idea that domestic work was work and vital to society and the economy, predating such arguments within the WLM and demonstrating that this period was not devoid of ideological contributions to feminism.⁸ Indeed, of the four demands voted on by those attending the first national conference of the WLM at Ruskin College in 1970, only the call for twenty-four-hour nurseries was new to British feminism.⁹ Indeed, there were occasions where existing organizations worked with the new liberation groups, such as in the winter of 1971/72 when the Women’s Lobby, part of the WLM, cooperated with the Fawcett Society over campaigns for workplace equality.¹⁰

Catriona Beaumont’s recent work goes further. In Housewives and Citizens, Beaumont argues that it is the intertwining of feminism with the Women’s Movement that has been the foundation of the ‘waves’ analogy.¹¹ She asserts that this constructs a false picture of female passivity and absence from public life after the Suffrage Movement that ignores the many active women’s groups situated outside of feminism in this period, such as the Women’s Institute or the British Housewives League.¹² As a result, the ‘Women’s Movement’ should be expanded beyond its feminist wing so that the gap between the first and second ‘waves’ is no longer ‘a “silent period” ’.¹³

The WLM did not materialize from a vacuum, and the Women’s Movement should not be defined exclusively by feminism. However, it is equally vital to emphasize that the WLM did stand as a new and distinct stage of struggle for women in the twentieth century. There was a clear upturn in the prominence of the Women’s Movement from 1968 and a surge of women’s liberation groups. There were seventy in London alone and many more across the country by 1969, something which both Thane and McCarthy accept.¹⁴ In addition, 1968 was marked by a number of equal-pay strikes by women workers, such as the famous strike at the Ford factory in Dagenham, also complemented by others at Vauxhall and Rolls-Royce, which symbolized the growing militancy of women in the Labour Movement against sexual inequality.¹⁵ Similarly, Beaumont concedes that although the WLM was not the only significant women’s group in the period – with the Women’s Institute (WI), for example, maintaining large membership figures – it did supersede alternatives as the primary campaigning organization for women’s rights.¹⁶ The proliferation of both the WLM groups and industrial militancy by working-class women throughout the 1970s serves to underline the significance of 1968 as a turning point in the nature of the British Women’s Movement and the arrival of, if not a new ‘wave’, then a more aggressive stage of the struggle for liberation and equality.

This book’s choice of 1968 as the start date for the new Women’s Movement is equally important as it is tied to the differing origin narratives attributed to the movement in this period. These are in turn linked to whether the birth of the WLM was the result of the coalescence of differing working- and middle-class women’s experiences and struggles or whether it was born solely out of the latter’s. The distinction between these narratives has rarely been made, but it is significant because of its implications for the role working-class women played in the formation of the WLM. Indeed, there has often been a tendency in historiographical accounts to emphasize only the circumstances of middle-class women as the underlying causes and catalysts for the WLM’s development.

Wendy Webster has argued, for example, that a generation of women in the 1960s faced the ‘transition from an educated and career-oriented identity to the role of full-time and servantless housewife on the birth of their first child’ and offers this as a key factor in the creation of the WLM.¹⁷ Leonore Davidoff provided a similar perspective, arguing,

It is possible that some of the impetus for the modern Women’s Movement was fuelled by the servantless young middle-class housewife of the late 1960s and early 1970s confronted with taking on not just the increase in physical tasks of food preparation, washing dishes and round-the-clock care of small children, but the additional unrelenting dependence of all family members on her for emotional attendance to the detriment of her own interests and identity.¹⁸

The final point concerning the interests and identity of the individual middle-class woman being harmed by social expectations of her domesticity was a problem which predated the WLM, having been made by Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein in their influential work Women’s Two Roles, originally published in 1956.¹⁹ The narrative of domesticity dashing the broader aspirations of middle-class women was often repeated in the memoirs of middle-class participants, such as the life histories in Liz Heron’s Truth, Dare or Promise and Michelene Wandor’s Once a Feminist.²⁰

Interestingly, this narrative was also asserted by those associated with socialist politics as a means of detaching working-class women’s actions and struggles from the WLM. The latter could therefore be more easily defined as a middle-class movement and consequently contrasted unfavourably with the behaviour of the Left towards working-class women, whose struggles they felt were more appropriately positioned under a purely ‘class’ umbrella. David Bouchier’s study of the WLM, for example, suggested that the WLM was formed out of the clash of young, educated, middle-class women’s expectations with the domestic idyll.²¹ This was contrasted with the women’s sections of the International Marxist Group (IMG) and other socialist groups who were allegedly united by a common focus on working-class women’s issues.²² Kate Marshall, who was a leading member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in the 1970s, took a particularly dismissive tone towards a movement which deviated from a universalizing class analysis of oppression. She offered this description of the WLM’s development:

The modern Women’s Movement is a product of the sixties . . . Beginning in the USA, the most prosperous of capitalist countries, middle class women became aware that material comforts only exacerbated the feeling of powerlessness that stemmed from social inferiority. Women perceived their oppression as a barrier to the fulfilment of individual aspirations; issues relating to economic inequality remained secondary . . . The fact that individuals were members of a society stratified into classes was not considered important at a time when these individuals enjoyed high living standards.²³

The early women’s liberationists were also described as mostly ‘petit-bourgeois youth’ and concerned with rejecting a material basis of struggle in favour of the fulfilment of individual needs.²⁴ This was a particularly stringent interpretation and was not reflected in even Bouchier’s analysis, which asserted that the WLM was essentially a socia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Women’s Liberation and Class Politics
• 3 Women Workers in the 1970s
• 4 Class Struggle in the Reproductive Sphere
• 5 Struggling with ‘Sisterhood’
• 6 Class, Autobiography and Collective Memory
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page